For those not familiar, you can read the diary here, and this article gives some examples of what I'm talking about. A relevant excerpt from it:
Pepys’s philandering also took place much closer to home. He had an eye for several of the young maids that worked in his household and engaged in a short, but intense, sexual relationship with his wife’s companion Deborah or ‘Deb’ Willet, which began around 1668. On 25 October of that year Pepys’s adultery was spectacularly uncovered when Elizabeth Pepys caught them ‘together’: ‘my wife, coming up suddenly, did find me imbracing the girl … and endeed, I was with my main in her cunny’. Elizabeth was angry and distraught, Deb was dismissed shortly afterwards and Pepys apparently ended the affair.
Although Pepys’s libido seems to have been insatiable, it was not always welcome. His opportunistic and predatory groping of women when the situation arose was resisted, fought-off and spurned by some. On 18 August 1667 Pepys wrote:
‘into St. Dunstan’s Church, where I … stood by a pretty, modest maid, whom I did labour to take by the hand and the body; but she would not, but got further and further from me, and at last I could perceive her to take pins out of her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again’.
Pepys sometimes showed remorse for his behaviour: ‘I went to her and played and talked with her and, God forgive me, did feel her; which I am much ashamed of’, yet he still recorded these intimate sexual experiences in his diary, concealing them with a comical combination of English, Spanish, French and Latin as if embarrassed to commit them to the page: ‘there did what je voudrais avec her, both devante and backward, which is also muy bon plazer’ (3 Jun 1666). Writing them down undoubtedly gave him pleasure and acted as absolution.
I've read a fair amount of the diary, and I've lost count of the number of times he engages in behaviour towards women that would be considered abusive today.
I am interested if this was normal for the age; and if it wasn't, if it had something to do with his position of power or just with his personal lack of self-control.
Would he be seen as a "pervert" in his lifetime, or was abuse that normalized that all this wouldn't be considered out of the ordinary?
Edit: I feel that I need to clarify what prompted my question. It is not the fact that abuse was prevalent during that age; it still is today, and I wouldn't expect 17th century England to be better in comparison.
What surprises me in Pepys isn't that he engages in abuse, it's the extreme frequency of it. One can almost say that there isn't an occasion where he can abuse a woman or girl that he does not do so. Sharing a carriage with a woman, sitting next to a woman in church, going to a store and being attended by a woman, being in a room alone with the maid, etc. are all occasions that often end up with him trying to grope them (or worse), even if they resist (which doesn't stop him from trying as much as he is able). It seems like he completely lacks self-control when it comes to this, and I can't figure out if this is explained by the fact that it was that normal, or if he was an exceptionally terrible example (since I've seen his impulsiveness being noted as unusual in articles about him).
Were 17th century men that abusive towards women and young girls, or was Pepys an especially bad example even for his age?
¿Porque no los dos?
We have nothing remotely resembling useable statistics on rape and sexual harassment for this era, and women's voice are few, far between, and often mediated through men with distinct and sometimes misogynist agendas. And numerically, we have statistics like in the Northern Circuit of England (Cumberland, Northumberland, Yorkshire and Westmorland), there were 25 rape cases prosecuted in 50 years.
So as I've discussed in this earlier answer for the Middle Ages, the key is to look at situations that would normatively be considered rape/forced sexual intercourse that were encouraged, allowed, or at least conveniently overlooked in a given era. Some of the cases I studied there (victorious soldiers raping women, girls, and sometimes boys; marital rape) are no less factors in the seventeenth century.
However, there's one case I didn't really cover there, that offered just right mix of vulnerable girls and women, lopsided power relations, easy opportunity for men to grope, assault, rape seemingly as they wished, and rising relevance in the 1660s: masters and their sons assaulting family servants.
Early modern England continued the so-called "European marriage pattern," that is, adolescents from the countryside--especially girls--moving into cities for to work as domestic servants. The urban population of England rose from 8% in 1600 to 17% in 1700, even though cities remained population sinks, that is, residents could not have enough babies to replace those who died. Some of these girls would work as servants for the rest of their lives, some never marrying. Others worked for a period of years (life-cycle work), saving up money for a dowry or just to set up their own household. Ten to 25% of 17th century women never married!
These servants primarily worked for private families, in their homes--and not just wealthy families, either. As with their medieval predecessors, they were particularly vulnerable to sexual assault from the men in the family and even (or especially) male servants. Laura Gowing is wrong when she says this was specific to Tudor and Stuart households based on particular early modern English notions of domesticity; Jewish and Christian authorities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries inveigh repeatedly against hiring female servants of the other faith community because the expectation was that the men in the household would rape them. So it is more accurate to say this was still a problem.
Gowing presents a catalogue of cases where masters simply assumed they had the right to their women servants' bodies. Martha Bevers's master Joshua Kay had no problem talking about his "dealings" with her, but when he got her pregnant, he sued her for defamation. Alice Ashmore testified that her master had raped her for a year, and told her, "Thou art my servant and I may do with thee what I please."
One of the things about the situation of servants that calls to mind the case of Pepys is the casual nature of "access" to rape that these men and their sons had. A servant's job included changing bedsheets, cleaning up bedroom, going to get various items when bidden, all of which are reported as offering opportunities for masters to rape servants. Or the case of Sara Basford, whose employers had her share a bed at night with his apprentice and another servant. The class-based power difference was less, but women servants were still considered fair access.
I'm stressing this point in the mid-17th century because this is when slavery in British America is institutionalizing. Male slave owners were already coming out of a culture where men believed they had sexual rights to the bodies of female subordinates, as they developed the racist norms that would govern Anglophone slavery.
As for Samuel Pepys?
Already living in a world where sex acts that would be recognized as forced sexual assault in other contexts were permissible, legal records nevertheless show us that some men (below the level of serial rapist-murderer types) were in fact worse than others. When Martha Bevers's former employer sued her for defamation when she claimed he was the father of her child, her family called in a string of witnesses: friends and neighbors testified that Kay was "a man of very lascivious carriage and much given to women." A statement like that one would not have even a hope of being effective in court if Kay were not an exception--or at least, as long as people accepted the possibility of a man harassing and assaulting women more than average.